Posts by Dani

To Pebble's point, I genuinely believe that the **** that was spewed in the first post of this thread is not any more sophisticated than those chain messages circulating Facebook that say things like copy and paste the sentence, "I don't give Facebook the authority to blah or the copyright to blah" into a FB post, thinking it will be legally binding.

As Harry points out, my first guess would be to check robots.txt and ensure you aren't blocking any pages from SEMRush. Also make sure you aren't using a CDN or proxy like Cloudflare that is blocking it from their side.

Hi and welcome to DaniWeb! Thanks for joining.

Many places ban or remove AI generated content.

We are one of them! :)

If Biim had provided a working solution, I’ll mark this question as solved.

The creator of Nepenthes says that it is ineffective against OpenAI which I take to mean that OpenAI is ignoring robots.txt.

As mentioned, Nepenthes uses the spoofing technique. Spoofing does not rely whatsoever on bots following robots.txt.

The OpenAI bot appears to be a bad bot.

Specifically, I would bet quite a large sum of money that the people who are complaining they can't get OpenAI to respect their robots.txt file either have a syntax error in their file, and/or aren't naming the correct user agents. I've seen people mistakingly try to reference a user agent called "OpenAI"! https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots/

The OpenAI bot appears to be a bad bot.

This is not my experience. OpenAI respects my robots.txt file perfectly. I do want to add, though, that robots.txt files are very finicky, and I have seen many, many times people blaming the bots when the problem lies with a syntax or logic error in their robots.txt.

Nepenthes and Iocaine do not spew garbage across the web. They feed garbage to bots that access the protected sites.

The technique you're referring to is called spoofing, and it's what happens when you serve one set of content up to certain user agents or IP addresses, and a different set of content up to other user agents or IP addresses. It's still considered spewing garbage across the web. That garbage is being fed into Google. Into Wikipedia. Into the Internet Archive. Into ChatGPT. And, ultimately, it will end up being consumed by innocent users of the web.

The creator of Nepenthes says that it is ineffective against OpenAI which I take to mean that OpenAI is ignoring robots.txt.

I would say it's ineffective against OpenAI because OpenAI can detect the content thrown at it is nonsensical, and/or they're being delivered spoofed content, and they choose to actively ignore it.

When you price and design a site for an expected human load, and then you get overwhelmed by bots, you can throw more money at it or you can take action against the bots.

It's true that the majority of websites on the Internet today spend more bandwidth on bots than they do on human visitors. However, there are both bad bots and good bots, and they are not created equally.

In my meagre understanding of all things web related, robots.txt is supposed to specify which pages of a website should be crawled or not crawled by bots.

This is true. The primary difference between good bots and bad bots is that good bots respect your robots.txt file, which dictates which part of your site the specific bot is allowed to crawl, as well as how often it is able to be crawled, while bad bots tend to ignore this file.

However, that does not mean it's not possible to tame bad bots. Bad bots (and even good bots) can easily be tamed by serving them the appropriate HTTP status code. Instead of a 200 OK, you would send them a 429 to indicate a temporary block for too many requests, or a 403 forbidden if your intent is to permanently block the bot.

Good bots (and even most bad bots) tend to understand the intent of the status codes (e.g. 429 means try again later, but at a slower crawl speed), and, either way, you …

Sorry, I'm confused. Do you want to decode the JSON in PHP or in Javascript?

If you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the precipitate.

I think this sounds terrible. The global population is, more and more, relying on AI to serve up accurate answers. There's already the gigantic problem of hallucinations as well as AI consistently spewing out false information that sounds entirely believable, and therefore spreading false information.

How is making the problem worse going to help with your mission of turning the world into a better place?

I’m not nearly as much of a conspiracy theorist. I also don’t think that spamming Facebook with nonsensical posts is going to make the world a better place.

I don't understand what goal you are trying to achieve?

Is your goal to open a dialog about the pros and cons of AI?

DaniWeb is powered by Cloudflare. One of the functions of Cloudflare is a sophisticated system to analyze and control how AI crawlers scan the website. In other words, if I want to dissuade AI bots from crawling DaniWeb, I would do so much more elegantly than by spamming the forums.

AI as it stands today is plagiarism on a grand scale.

I would have to agree with this. However, as a business model, the web has been set up so as to encourage (aka coerce) publishers to allow the unfettered crawling and indexing of their content in exchange for access to web traffic. We must allow Google to include our content in their generative AI overviews in exchange for any links to our site appearing anywhere in Google search results. Not being in Google is a death sentence, and, thus, we must comply. Preventing OpenAI, Applebot, Anthropic, etc. from crawling all of our content essentially means blocking ourselves from being found in the search engines of tomorrow.

Huh?? Why are you responding to someone's post with pure spam? If you agree it's spam, I'm going to delete your post with a Keep It Spam-Free infraction.

DANIWEB's design is their own. Best you can do for reply is to comment like this.

I think he's referring to Reddit.

Yes, precisely. Not a bug at all.

That's what happens when you click on the little link button in our editor toolbar, and then when prompted to enter a URL, you hit cancel instead, and so it adds [Click Here](null) where null is meant to be the URL the link should point to.

Dani, which is better for understanding our product and improving the conversion ratio: a 7-day free trial or a 30-day free trial?

I think that entirely depends on the product, how often it's typically used, how long it takes for a user to configure and get the hang of it, and how long it takes the average user to recognize its value and make up their mind that it's worth the amount of money you're asking for it.

Something else that's probably worth a mention here is that this all also depends on what the business objectives are. Is the primary goal to get more signups and people using the Chrome extension, or is the primary goal to get more subscriptions?

For example, suppose that with not asking for a credit card until after a 30 day trial, you get 100 signups, but only 1 of those people ends up forking over their credit card and signing up for a subscription. However, when you do ask for a credit card upfront, you get only 3 signups. That's 97 fewer people on your mailing list. That's 97 fewer people using your product. However, it's 3X the amount of revenue!

Which way you go depends entirely on the business needs and goals.

The short version of the polite reply I got was "nuh uh".

You got that response most likely because PyCoder has an understanding of what I explained here in this thread.

I think subscription models are really popular these days, and I am one of those folks who has a monthly subscription for Microsoft Office, Quickbooks, and tons of others. If you're concerned about entering your credit card information, then you might want to set up a virtual card with your bank (if that's a feature of your bank) just for the individual vendor. You can limit virtual cards to just certain amount limits as well as custom set expiration dates (e.g. a month away).

It looks like you have 800 pages that have been successfully crawled by Google, but Google chose not to index them because it felt as if they were too low quality (or some other reason) to make it into the index. Start by reviewing the pages that are in this category to see if you spot any obvious reasons why Google might consider them thin content, not enough unique content on the page, duplicate content (content that is largely the same or similar to other URLs elsewhere on the web, or elsewhere on your website), in violation of any of Google's policies, etc.

Pages in the category of alternate page with proper canonical tag are URLs that Google has discovered that have similar or identical content to other URLs on your website. Pages that are in this category are not indexed because Google instead chose the other version of the page because it was identified with the link canonical HTTP tag to be the primary version of the content.

It's hard enough to get a user's attention on the Internet long enough for them to see enough value in your product to take an immediate action that takes time on their end. But you are asking them to do it twice. First, to sign up. And then a second time, at a later date, to get out their wallet.

Something I forgot to mention is that the first time, during sign up, is when the user came across your product, and it caught their eye. This is when you have their attention the most. Not a month later when they're not thinking about you anymore, laying on the sofa watching TV, while casually scrolling through a hundred junk emails and you're just one of many marketing emails in their inbox. If there's going to be any time when a user is going to take the time and thought to hand over their credit card, it's going to be at that initial moment when you just grabbed their attention and you're foremost in their mind.

It might just be the case that for every 100 people who are interested in using your product if it were free, only 1 of those people find enough value in your product to pay for it.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but what if you were to ask for a credit card up front and have the free trial automatically convert to a paid membership after the initial 30 days? There's a reason most companies do it this way. And that's because you're trying to convert a user twice. It's hard enough to get a user's attention on the Internet long enough for them to see enough value in your product to take an immediate action that takes time on their end. But you are asking them to do it twice. First, to sign up. And then a second time, at a later date, to get out their wallet.

I would be very curious what the outcome would be if you were to run a test where you only sought the user's attention span the one time. At the least, this would tell you if your problem is that your target audience, at the moment you have their attention and interest, simply doesn't see enough value in your product to pay for it, or if the problem is that you're trying to convert them twice. If it's the former, then either your product needs to improve or your price needs to lower. Either way, you need to make …

When someone signs up for the free trial, that’s when you have their attention. You’re either solving a pain point they have, providing them something they want or that interests them, etc., and they’re taking the time to download your extension and sign up.

Is the expectation that they return to your website 30 days later with credit card in hand? Does the extension remind them that it will stop functioning soon? Perhaps after 30 days, they’ve gotten all the utility they need from your extension and no longer have a need for it. It could be a whole bunch of things. It’s hard to offer more without knowing some more details as to what the extension does and how you’re currently promoting it.

Are you prompting users to enter their payment information before starting the free trial, and then the trial automatically converts over to a paid membership after the 30 days?

Hi and welcome!

Hello and welcome back!!

You can post random code snippets by clicking on the Contribute link in the top navigation menu and then under Topic Type, change it to "Reusable Code Snippet". You can also contribute new topics by using the sidebar hamburger menu, selecting a forum category from the dropdown, and then clicking on Start New Topic.

To find the unanswered section, click Respond in the top navigation menu for unanswered topics recommended for you. Alternatively, from any forum or tag page there is a button that says Filter By ... and you can change it to Filter By Unanswered.

I hope this helps!

You're getting downvoted because AI-generated content is against our rules, and your post just comes across as if you copy/pasted some ChatGPT tips for good SEO.

Hello Tim and welcome to DaniWeb!

Hello, and thanks for joining.

It's incredibly hard to read your code because it is not properly indented.

That aside, a quick glance lets me see you are using PHP's deprecated mysql library instead of its replacement, the mysqli library. Additionally, you have a serious MySQL injection bug on line 16. You absolutely want to use real_escape_string() as so (my example code uses the MySQL instead of the MySQLi library, even though it's defunct):

$value = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['input1'], $link);
$value2 = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['MAmount'], $link);
$sql = "INSERT INTO demo (input1, MAmount) VALUES ($value, $value2)";

Now as far as your bug, I'm confused by your question. On line 56, you have $body = 'Print the data'; and then on line 63, you have $mail->MsgHTML($body); so only "Print the data" is going into the email message body. Instead, you can replace line 56 with something like: $body = "The new data entered is input $value with amount $value2";

Glad you figured it out, and sorry I wasn't around earlier in the week to help out. DaniWeb has used jQuery for a very, very long time now, so I'm pretty good at it (or so I think).

Hello there :)

What brings you to DaniWeb?

Hi Roni! What brings you to DaniWeb?

Hi and welcome to DaniWeb!!

Since we're still on this discussion, honestly, the free version of Disqus would probably suffice, and that wouldn't require anything more than copying/pasting a Javascript snippet.

Youtube, I suppose?

My bad. I was viewing all recent posts when I commented, and didn't note the topic title that this post came from.

As Jim points out, we typically review all new posts since our last visit, every time we visit DaniWeb, and delete as necessary. It would therefore be the exact same amount of work for the mod team whether those posts are already visible on the site or waiting in a moderation queue.

However, while it's the same work for us, I think there's an enormous difference to the new user who is looking for instant gratification. I, personally, would never post in a tech support forum (where I'm actively waiting to get the answer to my question for a problem I'm actively working on) if I had to wait for my post to get manually approved before it goes live. Perhaps that's just me.

The other factor to take into consideration is my health, coupled with how few moderators we have these days. What if it's a weekend and no moderator visits DaniWeb for 48 hours? That's not very practical or reliable for members.

On the other hand, as pointed out earlier in this thread, the Recommended Articles feature is designed to function almost like a moderation queue. That means that for newbies who casually browse the forums through the top navigation menu, homepage, related topics in the sidebar, forums, etc., they won't see any of the junk unless they go out of their way to seek it out (e.g. hamburger menu -> scroll half way down -> latest topics, latest posts, etc.).

Something else that was definitely …

Hi and welcome!! :)

What sparked your interest in web development?

Starting a digital marketing/SEO agency is really tough these days because there are just sooooo many of them. What about your stands out? Play to your strengths. Choose a niche and focus on that. For example, be the absolute best SEO agency for car dealerships. (Just a random industry.) Reach out to every car dealer in your area. Dealerships will want to sign with you because you cater exclusively to them, and they don't want to deal with a generic agency that doesn't know their industry and their clientele.

Would you please be able to give a little bit more background into what this code is supposed to do, and exactly what fails? For example, you wrote it doesn't save the input and file extension to the same document. What does that mean? On line 72 of your code, does it successfully create a directory when it needs to? On line 76, does it create a file, but just not the correct file? What is in the file? I'm not seeing anywhere in your code where you write anything to the file. Is the intent just to create an empty file? Is the code being run from a user account that has permission to access C:\Users\brett\Documents?

Stop spamming! :-P

Posting an unsolicited message for everyone to see.

I am really happy that you are fine. I haven’t seen any posts from you over the last few days (before yesterday), and I was a bit worried. I hope you are well and as vibrant as always.

Yeah, I've been having a hard time since Thanksgiving. I caught my first cold since the leukemia diagnosis and it hasn't been very fun.

I still can’t find a category on this site unless I’ve bookmarked its URL. In my opinion, that was a huge mistake, and I would have thought that by now, even you would have realized it was (but you haven’t).

I feel like you're confusing the "feature" I was pointing out, where forums default to showing recommended topics only, with your hatred for the tagging system (and some of the more popular forums such as C/C++, Java, PHP being replaced with tags).

That being said, I don't understand why you can't find what you're looking for here? How does the fact that it's a tag compared to a forum detract from your ability to find it? Anyways, I digress. I didn't mean to rehash the old forums vs. tags argument. I was only meaning to point out the filter dropdown functionality.

My opinion is that this change shattered DaniWeb communities apart, caused many people to leave, and was counterproductive.

Let's agree to disagree. The forums/tags change happened at the exact same moment of the Dazah disaster where all members lost the …

Is there a grand attack to make DaniWeb posts garbage ?

I would not say that there is a grand attack to make DaniWeb posts garbage, but I would have to say that there is a grand attack to make all content across the entire world wide web garbage. According to this (already outdated) article, 57% of the content on the Internet is already AI-generated, and that number is only growing exponentially.

It's a huge problem, and it has nothing to do with us being test cases, nor is the problem that our sign-up mechanism is great for bots. A lot of it has to do with SEO, and the entire digital marketing ecosystem, really. For the past 20 years, the digital marketing industry has hammered into marketers' heads that the best way to sell their products and services is to infiltrate themselves into niche communities and blogs on the web and pass themselves off as industry experts. When company representatives share knowledge with prospective consumers, they gain their respect, and they don't come off as marketers. Instead, the products shine for themselves as being well crafted by industry experts, for industry experts. This is the reason why every single business nowadays has a blog targeted to winning over industry experts of <insert product category here>. For example, NVidia has both a blog as well as an AI Podcast on Soundcloud. Obviously they wouldn't invest in all of this content if it didn't directly help them …

Unfortunately I don’t know VB.net. However, the way I would do it in my language of choice is to split the search string by spaces into an array of words. According to a Google search, this should accomplish that for you. Then, I would loop through the array of individual words looking for each one in my database. (Or, looping through the array to build an SQL query to search for any of the words individually.) Good luck!

I don’t use any of them. Our backend is PHP. Specifically, an old version of the CodeIgniter framework. For the front end, we use the Bootstrap CSS framework with Sass. I’m also old school and use jQuery, and I build a custom version of that as well with node. So I just do npm build type of thing. The HTML is hand-coded with a PHP templating library.

Actually, Basil, I do want to ask you. What exactly does your job entail as an SEO analyst for Woxro? Do you do keyword research? Track lead and conversion funnels?

Hi and welcome!

Hi Basil and welcome to DaniWeb!! I'd love to discuss SEO with you if you have any advanced questions. I've been in the industry for over 20 years.